Chicago Reader, a pioneer of the weekly alternative press, is one of the largest and most successful AAN publications, recognized throughout the industry for both editorial excellence and advertising impact. It publishes an average of 100 pages per week in...

If there's a downside to teaching children how to nurture a green, nutritious school garden, it's hard to fathom. The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called "school bonding," and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach.

Mangalitsas are an old Austro-Hungarian breed that had no presence in the United States until about three years ago. Like other old breeds, Mangalitsas are lard-type pigs, fattening well -- if slowly -- and producing juicy marbled meat.

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Rebecca Gilman's A True History of the Johnstown Flood is shot through with fictions and omissions. Gilman owns up to taking one such liberty in her program note, acknowledging that she invented almost all her characters.

Over the last half century or so, the family that self-medicates has become a trope of American literature. Hell — it's become a trope of America, and our theater's been the source of some of its most potent expressions.

Why don’t we sit around praising the “unwieldy, impossible machines” (or, you know, penises) of white, heterosexual guys who are still writing masturbatory prose about lesbian threesomes involving strap-ons, after all these years?